Simpson's Paradox in a Synthetic Microbial System
Simpson's Paradox in a Synthetic Microbial System
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DOI：
10.1126/science.1166739
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发表时间：
2009-01-09
期刊：
影响因子：
56.9
通讯作者：
Leibler, Stanislas
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Chuang, John S.;Rivoire, Olivier;Leibler, Stanislas
维持“公共”或“共同利益”生产者是合作演变中的一个主要问题。由于非生产者从共享资源中获益，而无需承担其生产成本，因此他们可能比生产者增长得更快。我们建立了一个由两种大肠杆菌菌株组成的合成微生物系统，这两种大肠杆菌菌株分别是生产者和非生产者。根据人口结构，这是不同的群体形成不同的初始组成，可以达到一个明显的矛盾的情况下，非生产者增长更快的每一组，但生产者增加整体。我们表明，一个简单的方法来产生这种效果所需的方差是通过随机波动通过人口瓶颈。因此，这里描述的合成方法提供了一种研究自然选择的一般机制的方法。
The maintenance of "public" or "common good" producers is a major question in the evolution of cooperation. Because nonproducers benefit from the shared resource without bearing its cost of production, they may proliferate faster than producers. We established a synthetic microbial system consisting of two Escherichia coli strains of common- good producers and nonproducers. Depending on the population structure, which was varied by forming groups with different initial compositions, an apparently paradoxical situation could be attained in which nonproducers grew faster within each group, yet producers increased overall. We show that a simple way to generate the variance required for this effect is through stochastic fluctuations via population bottlenecks. The synthetic approach described here thus provides a way to study generic mechanisms of natural selection.